Guy Adams' Twitter ban lifted
The reporter's account was suspended after Adams tweeted the e-mail of the NBC executive in charge of coverage of the Olympics.
British journalist Guy Adams -- the reporter for The Independent who became suddenly famous when
Adams explained -- via Twitter, of course -- that he received an e-mail from Twitter saying, "We have just received an update from the complainant retracting their original request..." and that because of that his account has been "unsuspended."
Yesterday, NBC admitted that it had asked Twitter to suspend Adam's account. A report in today's Daily Telegraph said that Twitter had alerted NBC to Adams' tweets and then NBC filed the request to boot Adams. Either way, Twitter created a firestorm of sorts when it suspended Adams' account after he tweeted the corporate e-mail address of NBC executive Gary Zenkel. Zenkel is president, NBC Olympics, and executive vice president of strategic partnerships for NBC Sports.
Though a Twitter representative wouldn't talk with CNET yesterday about individual accounts, Adams today said the company told him he had violated Twitter's Guidelines and Best Practices by posting a nonpublic e-mail address. Adams, in an e-mail exchange with Twitter that he shared with CNET, said he didn't think he was breaking the rules, since Zenkel's e-mail address is similar to others at NBC and had been posted elsewhere on the Internet.
Adams, who is based in Los Angeles, has been a loud critic of NBC's handling of the Olympics. In anticipation of the opening ceremony broadcast, he tweeted: "I have 1000 channels on my TV. Not one will be showing the Olympics opening ceremony live. Because NBC are utter, utter bastards."
Adams also has posted a piece on The Independent's site where he takes Twitter to task for not explaining how he broke Twitter's privacy policy. He writes:
For a company whose very raison d'etre is communication, Twitter had seemed remarkably reluctant to talk.
Even now that my account has been re-activated, all I got was a four-sentence e-mail from Twitter's "Trust and Safety" department telling me the initial complaint had been retracted.
I had been trying, for 24 hours now, to speak with an employee about their decision to suspend my account. But at that time while the storm of publicity was at its height, they simply wouldn't return e-mails or calls.
We've contacted both Twitter and NBC for comment on today's developments and will update this post if and when we hear back.